Shared Miseries Keep Bosnians Worlds Apart

Ana Vujicic, resolutely upbeat, counts herself among the fortunate because she is able to see her husband one day each month when he visits from Belgrade. He survived the war in one piece and works as a butcher in the Yugoslav capital, the only place where he could find a decent job.

Fatima Hodzic's husband, a soldier in the Bosnian army, was killed in action. She is bitter about his death, but she also considers herself lucky. "I say I am lucky because at least I know how he died and where he is buried," she said.

Hodzic, a 30-year-old Muslim refugee from Srebrenica lives with her elderly parents and two small children in Sarajevo, in a house previously inhabited by a Serb family.

Vujicic, a 29-year-old Serb from Sarajevo, is also a refugee. She lives with her young daughter and brother in an apartment in Srebrenica that belonged to a Muslim family.

At a time when the U.S. and its Western allies prepare for possible military action in the escalating conflict between Serbs and ethnic Albanians in nearby Kosovo, the situation in Srebrenica stands as stark testimony to the lingering limitations of the Dayton accords enforced by NATO troops in Bosnia.

Nearly three years after the U.S. pushed this agreement on the warring factions, the pact has halted the killing in Bosnia but failed in its larger goal of forging a lasting political solution that would allow Muslims, Serbs and Croats to return to their former homes and reshape a viable Bosnian nation.

On the map, Srebrenica is an insignificant dot in eastern Bosnia, a three-hour drive from Sarajevo. Politically and morally, however, Srebrenica commands the consciousness of Europe and the West. It was here, on July 11-12, 1995, that the Bosnian Serb army murdered some 8,000 unarmed Muslim men. The crime was committed in broad daylight, in front of the eyes of the world.

In the annals of 20th Century atrocities, Srebrenica will be remembered with My Lai, Katyn Forest and Babi Yar. Unlike those other places, which have become quiet graves where the dead rest and the living may go to reflect, Srebrenica is an unburied corpse.

Body count `approximate'

The dead of Srebrenica tell their own story. The Red Cross, which uses the most conservative figures, lists 7,347 people still missing from Srebrenica. Bosnian authorities put the figure at 10,000. All of the missing are presumed dead.

Over the last three years, international teams have exhumed approximately 1,500 victims from dozens of mass graves. The body count is "approximate" because a month or so after the massacres, the Bosnian Serbs tried to conceal the magnitude of their crime by digging up some the mass graves and moving them deeper into the forest.

"The Serbs dug up these graves with machines which macerate the body and spread it out all over the place," said Laurie Vollen, a Chicago-based doctor who has spent the last 2 1/2 years in Bosnia attempting to identify the Srebrenica dead. "Heart heavy work," she calls it.

The exhumations in 1996 and 1997 were from the original graves and most of the 900 or so bodies recovered were largely intact, Vollen said.

This year, international teams focused on the so-called secondary graves. The body parts recovered thus far from these graves are contained in more than 1,000 body bags, but Vollen estimates that this number probably represents no more than 500 individuals.

Out of the estimated total of 1,500 bodies exhumed during the last three years, only 30 have been positively identified. Of those, only two have been returned to families for reburial.

Most families of those still missing assume the worst, but they need to know for sure. Until they do, it seems there will be steady work for scam artists offering to sell "information" about secret underground prisons deep in Serbia where the missing are said to toil as slave laborers.

Evidence for prosecutions

Most of the Srebrenica exhumations have been done under the auspices of the United Nations' International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague. Tribunal investigators are collecting evidence for future prosecutions.

Vollen, a member of Physicians for Human Rights, is more concerned with identifying the dead for the sake of their survivors. "So that they can put this terrible chapter behind them," she said. "So that they can see a future."

Identification is difficult because all of the corpses are in an advanced state of decomposition. The victims were stripped of identity papers before they were executed. Since all were Bosnian males from mainly rural backgrounds, few clues to their identities exist because of a lack of medical and dental records and distinguishing social or racial characteristics.

The bodies that have been exhumed are first passed through a fluoroscope, which quickly reveals any bullets still embedded in bone or tissue.